Press Release

Jake Berthot

April 10 – May 10, 2008

Opening Reception: Thursday, April 10, 6 – 8pm

New York, Thursday, February 28, 2008. Betty Cuningham Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Jake Berthot at 541 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, New York City from April 10 through May 10, 2008. This is the second solo exhibition for Jake Berthot at the Betty Cuningham Gallery. Composed of approximately fourteen paintings and a selection of drawings, the show draws from Berthot’s work over the past three years. A fully illustrated publication with Berthot’s “Notes from Notes to Myself” accompanies the exhibition. The artist will be present for an opening reception on Thursday, April 10th from 6-8pm.

The paintings range in size from 19 x 18 inches to 46 x 52 inches. Each is a quiet contemplative, typically dark, space with reference to landscape. Landscape entered into Berthot’s painting following his move from New York City to upstate New York in 1996. These new works continue to have the central deep meditative space of his earlier work, in the 1970’s a gently touched rectangle, in the 1980’s a bar or hovering oval, and now a quietly emerging tree or glimpse of light.

News

Betty Cuningham Gallery will be hosting a memorial service for Jake Berthot

Sunday February 22, 2015 3-5pm

February 22, 2015

Selected Press

Observer/NEWSUp From AbstractionJanuary 12, 2011

It starts with a close-cropped view of the crotch of a tree, in smoky gray colors that circle around black. Embodied just enough to be recognized–Tree is a tree without twig or bark–it is not distinctly more solid than the sky behind it. Forking, like a road, in two equal directions, it is a diagram of the decision pregnant in its own ambiguous form: body or spirit? To specify or to dissolve?

For a New York painter to move to the country, to move upstate to live alone in the Catskill Mountains where they fold fiercely down into the Hudson Valley, is not so unusual. Such a turning away from the urban toward the rural could be circumstantially or existentially motivated, could be a mark of success or a final enactment of that fed-upness that periodically overcomes all city dwellers, and especially artists. Still, Jake Berthot had lived for thirty-three years in New York City before moving to the country in 1994.